This week, we'll be having a Featured Discussion here at PointOfLaw.com on litigation and the health care sector. The starting point for the discussion is the Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy's new report, Trial Lawyers, Inc.: Health Care, which assesses the impact of litigation on American medicine. Like all our Trial Lawyers, Inc. publications, it's written as an "annual report" focusing on various of the plaintiffs' bar's business lines--in this instance, the broad expanse of health care from drug and medical device manufacturers to doctors and hospitals to nursing homes and HMOs.

The discussion will be between myself and Bill Sage, a doctor and lawyer who's a professor of law at Columbia (and, this year, a visiting professor at Texas). One of the nation's foremost scholars in health care and the law, from 2002 through this fall Professor Sage has headed the Pew Charitable Trust's Project on Medical Liability in Pennsylvania. Earlier this year, Professor Sage made news as a co-author of a study, "Stability, Not Crisis: Medical Malpractice Claim Outcomes in Texas, 1988�2002," which according to its authors showed that "at least in Texas, the sharp spikes in insurance prices reflect forces operating outside the tort system." Ted Frank took issue with some of the study's purported findings with an in-depth analysis of its underlying data, here and here.

I'm very excited to have as distinguished a scholar as Bill Sage joining us for this discussion, and I look forward to what I anticipate will be an illuminating exchange.